The evidence is in: Investing in women's rights organizations works
Date:
Foreword by Abigail Erikson, Chief of the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women and Girls
As we began drafting this Annual Report, just before the seventieth Commission on the Status of Women (CSW70), we learned of the killing of Yanar Mohammed outside her home in Baghdad. Yanar co-founded the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) and opened the country’s first women’s shelters in 2003. For decades, she protected more women from honour killings, trafficking and domestic abuse, while facing death threats almost continuously. She never wavered in her pursuit of justice, safety, freedom and equality.
We are proud to have been a small part of Yanar’s story and of OWFI – one of many extraordinary organizations the UN Trust Fund has partnered with. We are devastated and angered at Yanar’s killing. She paid the ultimate price for defending women’s rights – like so many women in so many places around the world.
2025 was hard. Violence against women and girls rose. Backlash against gender equality moved from rhetoric further into action, including in intergovernmental spaces. Civic space continued to shrink as did funding for the women’s rights organizations holding the line, at the precise moment the line is hardest to hold.
In 2025, our Call for Proposals drew nearly 4,000 applications from 128 countries, requesting US$ 2.1 billion. We were able to fund less than 1 per cent – a gap that has held steady for years. As Chief of a fund dedicated to ending violence against women and girls, that number does not sit well with me. It measures the vast distance between what women’s rights organizations are ready to deliver and the resources available to them.
With more funds we can achieve more. An independent meta-analysis of evaluations completed across our 2021–2025 Strategic Plan confirms what our grantee partners have demonstrated for years – that sustained investment in women’s rights organizations shifts harmful social norms, expands access to survivor services, enables more responsive justice systems, and builds stronger and more resilient women’s organizations. Solutions exist, and women and girls and the organizations they lead are delivering them. The results in our Annual Report are a testimony to that.
2025 marked 30 years since the Beijing Platform for Action and 2026 marks 30 years of the UN Trust Fund – the only General Assembly–mandated, system-wide, inter-agency pooled financing and accountability mechanism dedicated to ending violence against women and girls. As the United Nations system reforms, mechanisms like ours – proven, durable and built on decades-long partnerships between the United Nations, Member States and civil society – are exactly what should be protected and strengthened.
As we launch our new Strategic Plan, our organization is evolving to meet this moment. We have transitioned to a globally based Secretariat (Bangkok, Bonn, Istanbul, Nairobi, New York and Panama City), to reflect a simple commitment to be closer to our partners and drive every dollar possible where it is needed most.
I hope our Annual Report demonstrates what becomes possible when women’s rights and civil society organizations have the resources, trust and flexibility to lead.
To our grantee partners: this report is yours. Thank you for shaping it with us. It reflects your courage, expertise and persistence. You continue to serve women and girls under conditions that would force many institutions to retreat – and you create new conditions that allow your work to thrive. Your leadership continues to move this field forward.
To our donors and Member State partners: thank you for standing with women’s rights organizations at a time when multilateralism is under attack and when funding is under pressure from increasing investment in military expenditure.
Ending violence against women and girls is possible. We can do this. We have solutions, we have the will, we have the partners, we have the mandates and we have the commitments.
To Yanar Mohammed, and to every women’s human rights defender: we carry your work forward, and we stand in solidarity with you.
Abby Erikson, and the UN Trust Fund team
Read the Annual Report 2025 here:
